Virtual vs F2F
Learning@school ‘09 was a fun conference. I was unfortunately only able to make 2 of the 3 days, but that aside, the experience was a good one.
One thing that did come through was the importance of F2F. I have been collaborating with a number of people in the virtual environment for a while and many of these people have become friends. But the virtual world can not replace meeting face to face (F2F). Being able to put a face to non de plume or avatar makes communication so much better. Meeting Simon (educating the dragon) and Jo (Dragonsinger) was brilliant as so much of what they have blogged has become clear. The chance to sit and talk to Richard adn Kelvin, Erin and Toni and the gang from core was great.
So much of what we communicate is missed or hard to reproduce in a virtual world. I once read that 90% of communication is non verbal. Having recently done a 1 hour presentation via elluminate this is painfully clear. As a presenter I am so used to gauging the speed, level and pitch of my presentations by the audiences responce, body language and attention. Trying to do this online is so much harder. Sure you can have them but up there virtual hands or watch the back channel chatter, but this is distracting and often hard to quantify.
I am not trying to bag the “virtual” tools, infact I find them invaluable and irreplacable. How else could I keep in touch with colleagues around the country and the planet. The relationships that I have developed virtually are cemented in the real world. and the ones created F2F are maintained virtually. I struggle to imagine a world without Skype, Google Talk, Twitter, Edublogs, Bloglines, First class, elluminate and wikispaces.
The trick is maintaining the balance.
February 28th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
So what do you think of an entirely virtual class?
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February 28th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Hi Darren
Challenging, exciting and quite intense
I suspect that it would be hard work to establish a repore with the students. However with appropriate technology like video conferencing the process would be easier. I feel that initially being able to see the students and them see the teacher would be very important. I know that distance ed practitioners often only use the video conferencing – video feed for the opening part of a session as it is often distracting.
So much of teaching is about people and relationships rather than just content and knowledge. I sometimes think that subject specialist teachers forget this and only focus on their subject.
The people at correspondence school are amazing
[Reply]
February 28th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
It was great meeting up at the conference, pity we didn’t manage a decent chat! These conferences for me have really become a different beast now that I have virtual connections with a lot of people. It is a real celebration to be together and it heightens the virtual connections by adding personality. It is indeed a strange phenomenon to connect with people in that way. I think the conference experience is heightened much more by being able to share it in this way. The best example of that is how we are all twittering and reading each other’s blogs now that we are home. The learning is ongoing and the relationships too.
[Reply]
February 28th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
[...] Andrew discusses the interesting case of virtual versus face-to-face. [...]
March 28th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
As an online teacher I rely heavily on tools such as Elluminate to make connections with my students (Grades 7-9). I’ve been teaching using Elluminate for about 4 years and it’s one of the most difficult things I’ve had to learn in my teaching.
I recently made a couple of sblog post about the different forms of communication I use and of course F2F was at the top of the list.
http://lynnfield.blogspot.com/2009/02/how-many-ways-can-i-communicate.html
and the response to the comment:
http://lynnfield.blogspot.com/2009/02/response-to-comments-from-last-post.html
[Reply]
April 16th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
[...] Andrew discusses the interesting case of virtual versus face-to-face. [...]